The problems of environmental pollution become serious with the rapid development of global economy. The wastewater in industrial fields containing considerable amounts of N, N-dimethylformamide (DMF), such as pharmaceutical, pesticide, petrifaction, leather industries, etc. Among these, the amount of discharged water containing DMF from leather industries reached one hundred million tons per year. DMF can enter into body through the respiratory tract, digestive tract and skin system, which is toxic. DMF is regarded as level II (moderate hazard level) according to classification for hazards of occupational exposure to toxicant, which becomes a carcinogen to experimental animals. In the process of daily production, DMF which is chemically nonreactive is usually used as an organic solvent, so there is no loss in dosage. Moreover, all of the DMF will pour into industry wastewater after production and exist stably for a long time. Therefore, if the problem is not solved, it will cause great pollution to environment.
Adsorption is a common method for the treatment of wastewater containing DMF, which has many advantages, such as short process, easy operation, good treatment efficiency, etc. But, it need to desorption of adsorbent after adsorption, and the cost is high and even cause secondary pollution. Furthermore, the adsorbent can reach a maximal equilibrium adsorption amount but cannot remove pollutant completely. Therefore, biodegradation method comes in to being to resolve the problems mentioned above, which has advantages in high efficiency, economical, environmentally friendly, strong stability and so on. However, high-concentrated DMF (2000 mg/L) have toxic to bacterial cells, which causes the negative effect in treatment efficiency during the treatment and limits the practical application.
Therefore, it is imperative to find a new strategy to deal with high-concentrated DMF in wastewater with the advantages of economical, high efficiency and stability.